Colocation helped Thomson Reuters setup a dynamic, scalable, high speed, low latency and competitive IT environment for the launch of a new product line

In today’s economic fragility, investing CapEx into data centers is not viable and CIOs are burdened dealing with uncomfortable truths such as low Return on Investments (RoI) and increasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) before IT investments can be made. Such tight fisted budget approvals have forced these IT leaders to look for alternatives and better technology strategies to get more from less.

In 2010, Thomson Reuters, world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals providing customers with competitive advantage, launched Elektron, a real-time network and hosting environment, to meet strong demand for fast and cost-effective access to the emerging cash equities market in India. Elektron enables hedge funds, asset managers, banks, brokerage houses, exchanges and other participants to connect to the world’s largest financial community and securely reach trading partners over the network globally.

Challenges At Hand

The Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters, Paresh Hede, had a few challenges in hand.

Elektron, which is a global service, needed an ultra-high speed, low latency network and hosting environment that was carrier neutral, and had proximity to Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) to help financial firms access and share information faster and cost effectively.

Not only that, business also demanded a scalableplatform to cater to their customer’s growth plans. They wanted to host all customers in a single hosted location.

Paresh turned to colocation to address these challenges, and time was running out to put the product into the market. Thomson Reuters shortlisted managed IT hosting partners to provide dynamic, scalable, high speed, low latency and competitive IT environment.

Colocation Offered Substantial Benefits

The decision to go the colocation way came as a boon to Thomson Reuters. They were able to derive huge benefits including:

They launched Elektron successfully in India within four months of the project being commissioned

With IT infrastructure being managed by a third party infrastructure partner, the company is assured of smooth and hassle-free IT infrastructure operations, and is able to focus on growing its business in India and globally

Robust, secure, scalable and a highly available IT infrastructure for their customers with negligible downtime

Flexible cost structure on a ‘pay-as-you-use model’ has helped the company to derive significant cost benefits

In Conclusion

While CIOs are looking at solutions to address their over-utilized data centers, or to put it positively, while looking at data center expansion or growth projects, they should look and evaluate options carefully.

Solutions to address these challenges are many. The trick lies in choosing the right path that fits the organization’s long and short term goals – along with keeping parameters such as performance, reliability, cost optimization and reduction, and ease of management, at the top of their priority list. Colocation offers several additional advantages that can help businesses as they meander the evolution path of their data centers.

Author : Nilesh Rane

Nilesh Rane is the Associate Vice President - Product and Service at Netmagic Solutions. Nilesh is an expert in the data center domain, specifically in areas such as Disaster Recovery, DR-as-a-Service, IDC and Bandwidth. He has extensive experience of over 10 years within the data center domain, out of his total work experience of 20 years. Nilesh has been with Netmagic for 6 years handing key roles and responsibilities within areas such as DR, DRaaS, IDC and Bandwidth.